Imagine the best possible cut of steak served with a medley of roasted vegetables. Who wouldn’t jump on the opportunity to indulge, right? It’s so easy to say that your target market is everyone, but that’s simply not realistic. On the most basic level, you can exclude vegetarians and vegans from your market. Digging deeper, considering that a good cut of steak at wholesale averages at $18.99/lb., you can exclude people with tighter budgets.

Although there are exceptions to the rule, it's OK to focus on the market most likely to purchase in order to concentrate your efforts. Remember that, according to the Pareto principle, 20% of your customers often represent 80% of your sales.

Here are five questions to ask yourself about your target market before you aimlessly start broadcasting across your social platforms:

Who Are They?

To connect with your audience, you'll need to collect as much information about them as you can. It’s important to collect data that describes your target audience based on income, age and level of education (demographics). You should also find information regarding their tastes and preferences (psychographics). This task may seem daunting, but there are a few tools that can help make your work more manageable.

The U.S. Census can isolate demographics based on zip codes. Another tool, one of my favorites, is Claritas by Nielsen, which provides demographic insights regarding income, age, race and household composition based on zip code. Claritas also provides customer personas to describe the population’s psychographic and behavioral attributes, which you can use to guide your communications.

“We understood that successful brands’ clients appreciate more than just products and services; they fall in love with the brands," said my friend Mohammed Ben-Tarif, CEO of Fanillah Apparel. "We haven’t found a better way to connect with our audience than social media channels, but to do this effectively, we needed to dig deep and invest in understanding our audiences intimately."

Where Are They?

Your lawn will still be green if you overwater it, but you’ll end up wasting a lot of water and your bill will be unnecessarily expensive. Provide sufficient attention to social media platforms that are most frequently visited by your audience, but do so efficiently. It's easy to say that you want social media real estate everywhere, but know the difference between watering your lawn and watering your driveway.

Start with information that already exists. Pew Research, for example, created a study that matches demographics to their preferred social media platform. Remember to use this secondary research as a guide and not as an absolute rule. Your analytics will tell you more about your specific audience than any generic report.

What Do They Want?

To understand what your customers want, you need to ask the right questions. Where’s the overlap in what they want and what you have to offer? Knowing this will help you stand out from brands that are shoving their products down followers' throats. If you understand what people are looking for, you're better equipped to position yourself well.

Build surveys that are objective, nonbiased and that encourage people to share their honest opinions. There are also tools that can help you gain a better understanding of what people are searching for online. Answer the Public, for example, is a website that provides a simple visual of relevant questions people are asking online that are related to the keywords you enter.